After dropping out of high school at seventeen, just five units short, I thought my life was over. I felt like I'd thrown away everything: my dreams of attending Claremont McKenna, my goal of leaving the Inland Empire (the "IE") and my quest to be somebody. I thought, I am a nobody. A loser.
For many years, I blamed myself. Even though I took my GED and ended up excelling in junior college and then at UCR and USC Law, I always felt less than. It didn't matter that I was an attorney with a fancy law degree from USC, dropping out of high school was my biggest shame. I hid it. I never talked about it until my dad died and I quit my prestigious law firm job and came back to the IE. Something I said I'd never do (never say never, it's a challenge to the universe).
And so decades later, I came home to the much (unfairly) maligned IE. And I found myself again, as a writer and as a deputy public defender.
In the process of writing of my memoir, I finally realized it was a miracle that I'd made it through most of high school at all. That epiphany made me realize that the story behind my stigma of being a high school dropout could become my superpower.
You see, in high school, I was an A student, and on the swim team, and yearbook. Then junior year, everything crashed around us. My dad lost his bar (as my mom always said, "a drinker owning a bar is a disaster waiting to happen" and happen it did), my parents lost our house, and we moved from rental to rental. I think we had to move three or four times in two years. Then my half sister Barb (who was in her twenties living in Oregon) died in a head on collision. It devastated my father. He locked himself in the bathroom with his gun and me and my mom talked him down.
By senior year, the stress of my family's financial struggles combined with all of my childhood chaos, began catching up with me. Most days, I couldn't get out of bed. I refused to go to school and I slept my senior year away to my mother's dismay. My mom would try to get me up out of bed, but if she did, I'd pretend to walk to school then wait till she left for her breakfast shift at the coffee shop and I would walk back home and crawl into bed. I now know that I was in the midst of a full blown depressive episode. As a deputy public defender who specializes in mental health, I've educated myself. And all the symptoms were there. But teenage depression was not a thing in the 1980s. There was little or no information or mental health treatment for teens who were struggling. I didn't even realize it myself. I thought I had just given up, which I had, but there was a reason, and a justification that wasn't my fault. It was my organic brain chemistry that needed help. I needed help. But no one helped me and I spent my graduation day under the bleachers crying, watching my twin sister graduate.
But this is not a sad story. Or at least not a story with a sad ending. I made it out of the IE then came back. I have a law degree and I'm working on another graduate degree. I have a job where I get paid to advocate for those paralyzed by their own mental health struggles. And I love my clients. People sometimes ask me how I represent people who are accused of doing bad things, and I always say, there but for the grace of a higher power, go all of us. I am them, they are me. We all have a story. And this is mine.
